


Marginalia

by themorninglark



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Gods, Storytelling, fox spirits, shrines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 08:20:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark
Summary: The tapestry that hangs at the back of the stage, on the side the audience cannot see, is wider than Shinsuke can hold now. He takes it by the corners, spreads it on the floor, smooths out the creases and picks up the red knot. With a gentle shake, it comes completely undone at last. A cascade of red threads tumble from Shinsuke’s hand like rivers to the sea.He picks up his needle and starts to sew.That night, Shinsuke lights the candles at the front of the stage and tells a story of blood. His eyes are bright and his voice is a weeping that sings.Of cleaning shrines, telling stories, and listening to find your own.





	Marginalia

**Author's Note:**

> This whole fic is really a love song to Kita Shinsuke, inspired by chapter 274, and a bunch of completely self-indulgent AU headcanons that have been brewing in my mind. I hope you come to love him as much as I do :')

 

The caretaker at the shrine in the valley, ten miles out from Arashiyama, is younger than he’d expected. Not that it matters, Shinsuke supposes, for the feeling’s clearly mutual.

“I sent for your grandmother,” he says, leaning on a sturdy broom, “because I heard she was the best.”

“Hey, you’re lucky that Kita-san even bothered to travel all the way out here—”

There’s a shuffling footstep in the gravel then, a hand clapped firmly over an open mouth and an indignant yelp that makes Shinsuke close his eyes for a moment.

“Shut up. He can’t even hear you,” murmurs Osamu as he drops his arm, looks over at the caretaker, who’s eyeing Shinsuke with open scepticism. The curl in Osamu’s bottom lip does all his talking for him. He has better causes to save his words for.

“I could make him hear me,” Atsumu retorts.

“Yeah, and that’d _really_ help Kita-san’s image.”

Shinsuke silences them both by straightening, standing up from where he’s crouched next to the fox statue. He runs his hand over the weathered stone, lets the red knot slip from his fingers as he faces the caretaker. Behind him, the wind rises in the bamboo grove, whispers a chant that’s no prayer, for Kita Shinsuke drew those lines a long time ago, charted the boundary between a prayer and a lie and called the middle ground his own.

Aloud, he says, “You’re right, sir. She is the best. I hope you’ll allow me to do what I can, in her stead.”

After a pause that skirts the edges of politeness, the caretaker gives him a grudging nod, and Shinsuke bows his head slightly in thanks.

He goes to the altar. He does not kneel.

There is a joss stick that’s half-burnt, its ends shedding ash into a wooden urn that bears the weight of years with a stoicism he rarely sees these days. Shinsuke reaches out and lays one hand on the urn. He looks up at the scrolls that hang overhead, written in a flowing script, where they flank a faded statue of a shrine’s minor deity. Who or what it originally was, Shinsuke doubts even the caretaker knows.

“Tell me your story,” he says. It is neither request nor command. They will listen.

His voice is the offering, and the gods, or whatever they are, accept it. There is a singing like embers in the heart of his palm, and when he peels his hand from the urn, a red thread trails away and breaks off. Shinsuke has palmed stories as smooth as silk, soft as velvet; this is neither. It is a rough, homespun cotton between his fingertips.

There is a steady heartbeat in his chest, and a smile that crosses his lips like a passing shadow. It’s a good story.

 

* * *

 

_Do you see them, Shin-chan?_

His grandmother used to ask him this, while sitting on the back doorstep of their temple, roasting chestnuts on a little charcoal stove. The smell made Shinsuke’s mouth water, made him think of the coming snow. He did not ask what _they_ were, for he knew that if he did, his grandmother would only wink at him, say, _the gods, of course._

He did not think that what he saw were gods, but it was not for him to admit such a disrespectful thing out loud.

 _I see them,_ he said, and never told her that one of them was curled around his shoulders right now, its bushy tail tickling him under his chin. He did not know where the other had gone, but it was never far from its twin; it preferred corners in the cool shadow, and he saw it during the night sometimes. Perhaps his grandmother had one or two of her own that he could not see.

And she’d smile her smile, with fewer wrinkles back then, fan the smouldering coals and let Shinsuke take a chestnut once they got cool enough to touch. _They are always watching._ She said it like it was something for Shinsuke to keep close to his heart, not to be feared; and so he wrapped it in his first threads and stitched it with his own two hands into a place where it would be safe. He feels it beating there, still, a talisman. One does not have to believe in a talisman to have it work, only in the faith of the person who gave it to them, and Shinsuke believes in that most of all.

The first time his grandmother took him to a shrine cleansing, the fox curled round Shinsuke’s neck like a scarf had stirred, leapt off his back and ran into the woods. When they meet again many years later, Shinsuke is seventeen and he has learned to shape the world.

 

* * *

 

_Here is a strange thing, now—_

Shinsuke, on his knees with a washcloth in his hand, pauses. A drop of water rolls down the side of the bucket. There is something like laughter in the air, something like wonder, and a red knot spiralling undone. The joss stick is almost out, and so the voice on the air is soft, barely a whisper.

_You are an empty vessel, little fox._

Shinsuke wipes a streak of dirt off the floor, sees it gleam and nods in satisfaction. The voice is already fading away. There is a moth on the pillar next to him, and the beat of its wings is the last anchor.

“Thank you for your concern,” says Shinsuke. “But I’m not empty. I have a thousand stories in me.”

_But you do not keep them. You give them all away._

Shinsuke keeps cleaning. The strokes are a familiar rhythm, and he finds comfort in them; this is his ritual, and the gods, if they exist, must see him now, but even if they do not, he is fine with it. He has been taught that silence is a perfectly acceptable answer when words are inadequate, and so he keeps that silence now, precious in his mouth like a shard of ice that will not melt.

There is a soft footstep padding behind him, then. It’s Osamu. He says nothing, only leans against the pillar with his hands in his pockets, turns to stare at something Shinsuke can’t see, his expression placid. If it were Atsumu, there might have been a retort smeared like stolen cherries on his lips, but Osamu breathes it out and settles for a _non sequitur_ instead.

“I’m hungry.”

“One persimmon,” Shinsuke murmurs, without looking up. He wrings the cloth out into the bucket and sits back on his heels. Putting his palms together once more, he faces the altar and inclines his head in farewell.

The moth flies out of the shrine door and alights on a lantern, wings spreading. The light inside flickers on, a breath that illuminates the cobbled pathway for a moment, and then the moth takes off again, disappears into the sky. The light fades.

Shinsuke stands up. Already, the altar is quieter; not the uncanny silence that heralds the presence of something lying in wait, but a hum that sounds like the universe in a drop of water. Beneath the darkening sky, the shrine, freed from the forgotten story of its lingering spirit, tilts itself back into the balance of things.

“It’s done,” Shinsuke tells the caretaker on his way out, and earns a nod for his efforts that might even be respectful. Atsumu, in fox form, gives the caretaker a little nip at his heels before he turns human again and saunters back to Shinsuke’s side.

“You sure you don’t want payment?” the caretaker calls after Shinsuke, when he’s halfway down the path to the _torii_.

“I already have payment,” says Shinsuke, and smiles as he leaves.

Atsumu wraps his arms round himself and shivers. It isn’t the least bit cold, despite the season.

“It creeps me out when you smile like that.”

Shinsuke only smiles wider, just for Atsumu, and walks on. One of the shadows by his side is growing longer, the other shorter, as the last of the day slips beyond their grasp with barely a whisper. His own shadow holds steady, as it always does.

He waits till the shrine’s out of sight, then stops. In the distance, the moon’s shimmer cuts a scythe into the the night sky. Shinsuke raises his clenched fist and opens his hand.

Atsumu yawns. Osamu, by his side, takes a bite out of his persimmon and looks down at the pulsing red knot. It’s already unravelling, scoring a vein in Shinsuke’s palm that cuts right across his luck line.

This time, it is Osamu whose tremors shake Shinsuke. By this light, he could be eating the moon; he could be taking a bite out of it and keeping that reflected glow inside of him, and it is the sort of thing that Osamu would do just because he could. But he is not eating the moon, Shinsuke knows, for that is a deed of the gods, and whatever they are—all three of them—they are no gods.

“This will make a good addition to the tapestry,” says Shinsuke.

“Does this mean we’re _finally_ going to see Aran-kun?” Atsumu asks, breaking into a grin.

Shinsuke nods, and walks on. He doesn’t need to turn around to see the little bounce in Atsumu’s step, the way Osamu beams, and he doesn’t need them to see this smile of his either, the one that’s fond and more linen than velvet.

 

 

 

 

Aran tells him he’s sent the curtains to the tailor in town for patching, and Shinsuke’s little frown is eloquent enough to convey what he thinks of that.

“Well,” says Aran, loading up a green-glazed ceramic plate with _warabi mochi_ and too much _kinako_ powder, “I never know when you’re coming!”

“I always come in time to mend the curtains.”

“Yeah, Oomimi said you’d give me an earful… but they were _really_ falling apart.”

Shinsuke picks up his cup of tea and blows on it lightly. He takes a sip, looks up at Aran. “They would not have fallen apart until I arrived.”

“We’re late, Kita-san, because we took that detour to help that unfriendly guy,” says Atsumu, stretching back with a lazy yawn. Osamu, on Kita’s other side, is napping with his head on the table. Aran, in spite of his initial grousing at having been tackled by Atsumu on his front porch, and nearly knocked to the ground, has been kind enough to fetch Osamu a blanket and a bowl of rice without being asked, and pretended not to notice when Atsumu whined about him _playing favourites_.

Shinsuke had told Aran, once, that the twins only showed themselves to people they really liked, and Aran had grumbled that he wasn’t sure it was all that much of an honour, which made Shinsuke smile.

His gaze drops to the collection of oddments on the table. A kernel of corn, a blade of grass, a wisp of cloud that he caught in the wild, drifting about a deserted shrine by the roadside. The stone tablets there had been all but lost to a carpet of moss. He had spent an afternoon cleaning it off, while the twins amused themselves batting the cloud around with their paws and tails. No two stories take quite the same shape, and even Shinsuke’s not quite sure what shape the cloud is now.

He reaches into his pocket for the red knot with the frayed ends, and adds it to the pile.

“If not for that unfriendly guy, we wouldn’t have this. And we wouldn’t be here,” he reminds Atsumu.

“You can mend the stage instead. Some of the wood is splintering,” Aran offers.

“I’ll do that,” Shinsuke nods. “Later.”

Aran’s got that gleam in his eye, the one that Shinsuke’s learned to indulge when he can.

“And you’re staying to tell a story, of course! After coming back with such a fine assortment, eh?”

“You should, Kita-san,” murmurs Osamu’s voice then, and Shinsuke starts. Osamu hasn’t budged. His head’s pillowed on his arms, eyes closed; Shinsuke supposes he should not be surprised that Osamu’s been listening all along.

“You always look happy when you’re telling a story,” says Atsumu, resting one arm on Shinsuke’s shoulder. He’s warmest like this, when the sun’s been out for a while and the light is golden in his hair, upon his skin, in those sensitive fingertips of his, now pressing into Shinsuke’s arm in their insistent way.

“Will you play the _shamisen_?” Shinsuke asks.

Atsumu flexes his fingers and lays them down on Shinsuke’s sleeve, grinning into his ear.

 

* * *

 

The tapestry that hangs at the back of the stage, on the side the audience cannot see, is wider than Shinsuke can hold now. He takes it by the corners, spreads it on the floor, smooths out the creases and picks up the red knot. With a gentle shake, it comes completely undone at last. A cascade of red threads tumble from Shinsuke’s hand like rivers to the sea.

He picks up his needle and starts to sew. It is painstaking work. When he pricks himself, he does not stop; he keeps the rhythm going even as he weaves the rest of the stories in, bit by bit and breath by breath. Some are lighter than whispers, some are flowers out of season, and they give up their colours with a sigh when Shinsuke takes his needle to them. Some are stars that lose their lustre by day and come alive only in the dark. Some are exactly what they look like.

That night, Shinsuke lights the candles at the front of the stage and tells a story of blood. His eyes are bright and his voice is a weeping that sings.

_The eyes to see, the ears to listen, the hands to work, and the voice to shape._

The theatre had been half-empty when Shinsuke started his story, for no one had remembered his name. It is half-overflowing now, people on their feet in the aisles, spilling out the open doors. It washes over Shinsuke like a tide that does not touch him. He is the only one that emerges dry as a bone.

There is a sigh on the air when he finishes, something that could be gratitude from a minor spirit who’s no longer forgotten, who lives on, now, in the words upon his tongue and in the rose-petal strains of Atsumu’s _shamisen_ , and even with his forehead pressed to the floor, Shinsuke knows that his stitches have taken, and the seams bind true.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Aran sleeps in and it is Oomimi who sends Shinsuke off with a _bento_ and an earful of rumours about troubled shrines.

“In case you’re wondering where to go next,” he says.

Shinsuke hands the _bento_ to Osamu, who accepts it with a smirk on his face for Atsumu’s benefit, and Atsumu tapes up his fingers and scowls.

“You could always stay longer, you know,” Oomimi adds, crossing his arms. He doesn’t go so far as to insinuate that it would be a welcome thing, to say that Aran had missed him, to say that if he stayed, people would remember his name.

Shinsuke looks down the bend in the road. “If I stayed around, your curtains would never need mending.”

Oomimi raises his eyebrows. “Are you saying you leave so that... you can come back and mend the curtains?”

“Maybe it’s something like that,” Shinsuke says, and waves his farewell.

At the first fork, Osamu raises his head and remarks that the air smells funny on the western path, and so it is that path they take, littered with fallen leaves that have just started turning all colours of the setting sun. It is Atsumu who changes back to fox form first, for Osamu’s still busy tucking into the _bento_ , and his tail whips up a hurricane of leaves. Shinsuke catches one as it rises on the wind and braces himself as Atsumu turns to take a running leap upwards, lands sure-footed on Shinsuke’s shoulders and wraps himself round his neck with a smug grin.

Osamu is content to lope silently by Shinsuke’s side, his nose close to the ground, his footsteps silvery whispers that linger long after they pass.

They find the source of the odd smell in a village shrine that hasn’t been cleaned in years. Shinsuke gets on his hands and knees for this, and a harvest god that no one prays to any more leaves him his story in a sheaf of wheat before he departs for good.

 _I could tell your story,_ Shinsuke offers. _Make people remember you—_

_Ah, little fox, you are kind. But people no longer need to remember me._

It is not the letting go that bothers Shinsuke, afterwards. It is being called _kind_ that sticks most of all, that keeps Shinsuke lying awake that night. There is a litany of things he has been called. He has carried them around inside him. Ice that will not melt, threads that stretch and do not break, little needles for every kind of stitch that can be imagined, some that cannot, and some that human hands have yet to make. None of these things are kind, or so Shinsuke has been given to believe.

Atsumu, as if sensing the cracks in Shinsuke’s heart, nestles a little closer in his sleep. Shinsuke turns so the fur of his tail is soft on his cheek.

 

 

 

 

Shinsuke’s hands are wet and smell of roses, and that is how he knows this story.

He has been dreaming. The floor of the temple is dry and hard, the futon thin. He sits up, back straight.

Behind him, he hears laughter. He does not turn, for he recognises the timbre of it; that golden sunlike gleam. He has heard it in a daydream. He has heard its twin at night, when the moon is a pale circle behind the clouds.

“Come out,” he calls, and Atsumu does. Like a memory shimmering back into the present, he closes the distance between them in an instant, and Shinsuke feels an arm on his shoulder, feels an embrace wrap round his neck in a gesture so familiar it aches.

Shinsuke closes his eyes, swallows and opens them again as he tilts his head to catch a glimpse of the fox pressed against his back. Atsumu’s hair is a different colour now. When they were pups, they’d been so like two peas in a pod; indistinguishable except for their habits, and it is Atsumu now without a doubt who has found his old place again. He’d always been the one with no regard for personal space.

“It’s been a long time, Kita-san.”

 _So formal,_ Shinsuke wants to say, except he has the feeling that Atsumu would certainly take advantage of any permission to be casual, and so he reaches back instead, rests his hand on the top of Atsumu’s head like a benediction.

“Oh, _Atsumu_ gets head pats. That’s just unfair.”

It is another murmur that comes to Shinsuke’s ears now, one that’s tipped in quicksilver and rain, and Osamu slides out of the space between the dancing shadows. Unlike Atsumu, he does not make this reunion so easy; he stays where he is, and the stars are grey in his eyes to match his hair.

Shinsuke smiles, stands and crosses the room.

It is so like Atsumu that he would return with roses, in their pink and showy glory, and it is so like Osamu that he would return with still waters, running deep.

“It _is_ unfair,” says Shinsuke, and cups Osamu’s face in his hands, tilting it down to kiss him on the forehead. This will be the first and last time they touch in this manner, for they are not _touching_ people, either of them, and there is a harmony in their bones that makes them both excruciatingly aware of that in this one still, perfect moment.

 

* * *

 

 

This one is a love story. Shinsuke never tells them that.

 

 

* * *

 

 

In a temple on a hillside surrounded by cypresses, Shinsuke lays his hands on another altar, comes away with a fistful of feathers and watches as they dissolve, listens to birdsong on the air. This one is a story of flight, a story that takes an abrupt turn with a broken wing, and it is this feather that remains in Shinsuke’s palm when all the rest are gone.

“This one’s sad,” Osamu murmurs. He’s sitting just behind Shinsuke, legs curled under him in the same way he curls his tail when sleeping, one fingernail scratching a faint half-moon mark in the worn-out floorboards, as if to say _we were here_.

Osamu tends to hang around for the cleaning, while Atsumu makes himself scarce. He likes to listen, but it is rare that he passes comment on any story.

Shinsuke closes one delicate fist around the feather, asks, “Why?”

Osamu stares at him. “Because it didn’t end happily?”

“But the ending was just one part of it,” says Shinsuke.

He looks up, beyond the wooden shingles of the roof above them, beyond the branches that shelter this quiet path. Somewhere up there, there is a one-winged bird with this song on its beak, even if it is in a world they cannot see.

“Every story is built upon the little things,” Shinsuke continues, running his index finger across the shaft of the feather. He does not stop to linger on the break. “Endings are... no more than a byproduct.”

Osamu smiles. “You _would_ say something like that.”

 

 

 

 

It is Atsumu who asks, because it is Atsumu who is pushy like that. He asks it as Shinsuke is sitting in _seiza_ at the sliding door, facing the bamboo grove, a half-full teacup on a tray nearby. The night is bright with fireflies.

“What do you _really_ want, Kita-san?”

Shinsuke watches pinpricks of light weaving through the bamboo. “Perhaps I want to be left in peace, Atsumu.”

“Hmmm,” Atsumu hums. He sits down next to Shinsuke, far too close again, and stretches his legs out. The blades of grass beneath his feet part with a whisper that’s less protest and more nonplussed resignation.

“Do you think you’ll ever be finished?”

“Finished?” Shinsuke echoes.

“With the tapestry of stories. It seems like an awful lot of work on top of _cleaning_.”

Atsumu makes a face when he speaks of cleaning, and Shinsuke can’t help the tiny smile that curls round the corners of his mouth.

“Maybe I do it because it’ll never be finished,” he murmurs.

“You’re a _masochist_.”

Shinsuke says nothing to that. He looks down at his hands instead, turns them upward for a while, imagines those firefly lights dancing in the space he holds. They would die, of course, when the sun rose, but the night would fall again and then they would return. It is this sort of constancy that Shinsuke understands, a journey that doesn’t end with the little deaths visited upon them along the way, a journey that goes on.

Atsumu’s still talking, as he does. “Your grandma had the right idea, you know. Just light them up and send them down the river every _Obon_. Back to the spirit world where they belong.”

Shinsuke turns, startled. “You saw that?”

“We saw everything,” says Atsumu, and for a moment, his eyes flash gold in the dark.

“I thought you’d left me, then,” says Shinsuke.

He does not mean to let it, but the tremor in his voice finds its way to the surface, a little earthquake he contains in his throat, and perhaps it is this that brings Osamu out of the shadows like a ghost, like a vision that is not quite a nightmare, too late for a daydream.

“We never left you. We just stayed out of your way, for a while.”

“Why?”

In the silence, Osamu smiles, and it is Atsumu’s smile on Osamu’s face and Osamu’s quiet on Atsumu’s lips, and Shinsuke’s palms are sweating into his knees where they’re pressed. The night is a mirror that turns them inside out.

“Were you lonely, Kita-san?”

Shinsuke does not know which twin it is who asks that question. He reaches for his tea, takes a sip to still his beating heart, and when he sets it down and looks up again, they’ve both disappeared.

 

* * *

  

The next time they take the road through the bamboo grove, Shinsuke is pleased to see that his grandmother made it to the shrine in the valley, in the end.

“ _Baa-chan_ ,” he greets her, with a warm embrace; her arms around him are more frail than they used to be, but not too frail, he notices, to have knitted a new sweater, this one with his name on it.

“It’s getting cold,” she says, with a twinkle in her eye. “I thought you could use it.”

“You didn’t have to come all this way to give it to me.”

His grandmother rests one hand on the fox statue next to her, looks at the altar behind them. It’s been well-kept since Shinsuke cleaned it. There is a fresh joss stick in the urn, and the caretaker even spares Shinsuke a cordial nod when he sees him.

“You did a beautiful job here, Shin-chan,” says his grandmother, her voice quiet with pride.

“I was just a substitute,” Shinsuke murmurs.

A flurry of flying earth, a dust cloud that sounds like laughter, catches his attention then, and Shinsuke looks past his grandmother to the vegetable patch near the caretaker’s hut. The twins are chasing each other in circles, and it is Atsumu who’s faster, but it’s Osamu who’s cannier and who wins in the end, pinning Atsumu down with one paw and a soft, satisfied swishing of his tail. Atsumu leaps right back up, and they tumble round in a mess of gold and silver for a breathless few moments, and Shinsuke cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. He laughs. He does not mean to, and it escapes from his lips like a bell that has not sounded for years.

“Ah, Shin-chan.”

There is affection in the way his grandmother says his name, roasted chestnuts and warm embers, and stories that float downstream. They had let so much go, in the past; they had looked to tomorrow, and it had not let them down, for even if it did, they kept moving, restlessly, relentlessly. Shinsuke had given all of his stories away because he had not thought he needed them. They were memories, the little things that made up the pieces of other lives, trickling down the river of time till they washed up in these hands of his.

Somewhere along the way, they had found a place to linger in those cracks of his heart, and they had become a part of him too.

“Did you enjoy it?” his grandmother asks. It is a simple question, and Shinsuke is surprised, just a little, to find the answer is simple too.

“Yes,” he says.

 

* * *

 

Aran has saved the curtains for Shinsuke’s needle this time, and he is delighted that Shinsuke has brought his grandmother with him. He busies himself making a comfortable nest of cushions and a proper cup of tea and throwing Atsumu out the door, though Osamu’s allowed to stay if he does not cause a disturbance, which is not a problem for him.

Shinsuke, sitting on the threshold between one twin and the other, lays the curtains flat on his lap. Atsumu, in human form, all the better to whine with, keeps up a constant stream of muttering at Shinsuke’s feet as he plays tic-tac-toe by himself in the dirt.

Inside, Aran’s got a small heater going and the earthy scent of _houjicha_ wafts faintly to Shinsuke, as does Osamu’s quiet breathing, his grandmother telling Aran, with fondness, that he’s grown so big and tall, and Aran’s sheepish laughter.

Shinsuke lets his hands do what they do best. He does not cut corners. He makes a neat row of stitches in the hems of the curtains where the moths or the mice always get them, and as his fingers set to it, sure and true, he pours another little bit of himself into this work. It is the least glamorous of any of the works in the theatre, but it is honest, and it is real, just like everything and everyone around him right here and now.

_It feels good._

Shinsuke’s gilded voice has breathed life into a thousand stories. In this moment, there is nothing more he has to say about this one.

 

* * *

 

_What do you really want, Shinsuke?_

 

_I want—_

 

 

 

 

Later, Shinsuke will dust off the shoulder of his sweater in search of a stray golden hair, and he finds it right where he hopes it will be, where Atsumu’s tail is used to resting; later, he will go to the corner where Osamu had been napping and pick up a strand of fur that’s silver in one light, grey in another.

He will go to the twins, who are waiting for him backstage. Atsumu’s warming up on the _shamisen_ , and Osamu’s tapping out a rhythm like a river on the percussion. It had surprised Aran, the first time he saw them on their instruments; he had remarked to Shinsuke that Atsumu seemed more the sort to enjoy banging on drums, and Osamu struck him as the delicate one. Shinsuke had only smiled, said, _they’re full of surprises_.

At the sound of his footstep, the twins stop playing and look up at him, as one.

Their smiles are mirrored, and Shinsuke bends down in front of them and holds out his hand. The matching hairs lie intertwined in the middle of his palm. They are short, as threads go, but Shinsuke’s done this long enough now to know that a story doesn’t have to be long to be powerful.

“Tell me your stories,” says Shinsuke.

Atsumu’s eyes go wide, and Osamu’s fingers trail a beat across his drum that echoes in Shinsuke’s bones. It sounds like every leaf on the trees outside falling at once. It sounds like rain.

“Are you sure?” Osamu asks.

“We might disappear, you know—” Atsumu starts.

“—and then you would be lonely.”

“So lonely.”

It’s a whisper like music upon Atsumu’s lips, a chord that he first plucked on a _shamisen_ by accident, years ago. Shinsuke has been hearing it for so long he had forgotten what it sounded like. It had become another note in his life, but it had never been his to keep.

“I am learning,” murmurs Shinsuke, “what it is to be kind.”

It is Osamu who leads, touching a fearless fingertip to the silver hair in Shinsuke’s hand as their eyes meet, and it is Atsumu who finishes as he started, reaching up to wrap himself around Shinsuke’s neck one last time. In his fox form, he presses a paw against the golden hair.

Everything cracks open, not at once but piece by piece, and Shinsuke knows there is one more mending he has to do.

 

* * *

 

But first, he allows himself to cry into his balled-up sweater, and his tears are not the kind that contain the universe in them; they are just the tears of a boy who loved and was loved, and who has beheld the enormity of that love for the first time.

 

* * *

 

_I want—to want._

 

_I want to feel._

 

_I want to live._

 

* * *

 

Before Shinsuke takes to the stage that night, he taps Aran on the arm where they’re standing in the wings, keeps his gaze steadily forward as he speaks.

“I think I will stay a while, this time. If you do not mind, that is.”

Aran scoffs. “Of course I don’t mind. But why the change of heart?”

Shinsuke looks up at the tapestry on the wall. Aran follows his gaze, and the way his eyebrows shoot up tells Shinsuke that this is not one of those things only he sees.

“Whoa,” Aran breathes. “You finished it.”

It is Shinsuke’s best weaving yet. Silver and gold run through the tapestry like ribbons of light, like breathing; through every part of it, every feather and blade of grass and maple leaf, there is nothing Atsumu and Osamu have left untouched, nothing Shinsuke’s careful needle has missed. The twins had been contrary, strong-willed to the end, and their strands had twined together in unexpected ways before splitting apart, and there is a rippling like water in one far corner of the tapestry, a soft pink blush in another that smells like roses.

“Not quite finished,” says Shinsuke.

He leaves it at that, steps out on stage, and kneels to claim memories he has never put words to before. In shaping them with that voice of his, he sets them free.

 

* * *

 

_“My name is Kita Shinsuke, and this is my story.”_

 

* * *

 

At the entrance to the theatre, he sees two familiar figures bracketing the open doors, and this is not a dream.


End file.
